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I have been spending the month of May cleaning out my basement office. I have found a treasure trove of old papers and random things bringing up memories and other thoughts. Just like my last blog post on an organization's values and the culture it creates. This time I found two legal pads which had my notes and planning for my first Drupal Meetup talk and first came session.

This is the first in a series of posts where I'll capture how I built a new Drupal 8 version of jeffbeeman.com using BLT, Dev Desktop, and Lightning. In later posts, I’ll talk about other local development solutions, dependency management, content migration, and how BLT helps me build and deploy artifacts to Acquia Cloud.

It’s Saturday! Woo! What cannot be accomplished on such a day as today!? I know what I’ll be doing. I’ll be here at CMON Expo, hobnobbing with gaming media. Some of them I will now feature here on today’s Review Roundup. Today we have: Hard City, Destiny Aurora: Renegades, Castle Von Loghan, Meeple Circus, Karuba: […]

So, you may be the kind of person who usually stays away from the Sprint Room at Drupal events. We understand. You would like to find something to work on, but when you step in the room, you get the feeling you're interrupting something really important that you don't understand.

It's okay. We've all been there.

That's why the Drupal Community invented the Mentored Core Sprint. If you stay for this sprint day, you will be among friends. You can ask any question you like. The venue is packed with people who want to make it a useful experience for you.

Come as you are

All you need in order to take part in the first-time mentored sprint are two things:

Your self, a human who is interested in Drupal

Your laptop

To get productive, your laptop needs a local installation of Drupal. Don't have one yet? Well, it's your lucky day because you can your Windows or Mac laptop set up at the first-time setup workshop!

Need a local Drupal installation? Come to the first-time setup workshop

After about half an hour, your laptop is now ready, and you can go to the sprint room to work on Drupal Core issues ...

You do not need to be a coder ...

You do not need to be a coder to work on Drupal Core. Let's say, you're a project manager. You have skills in clarifying issues, deciding what needs to be done next, managing developers, and herding cats. You're great at taking large problems and breaking them down into smaller problems that designers or developers can solve. This is what you do all day when you're at work.

Well, that's also what happens here at the Major Issue Triage table!

But - you could just as easily join any other table, because your skills will be needed there, as well!

Never Drupal alone

At this sprint, no-one works on their own. You work collaboratively in a small group (maybe 3-4 people). So, if you don't have coding or design skills, you will have someone alongside you who does, just like at work.

Collaborating together, you will learn how the Drupal issue queue works. You will, most likely, not fix any large issues during the sprint.

Learn the process of contributing

Instead, you will learn the process of contributing to Drupal. You will learn how to use the issue queue so you can stay in touch with the friends you made today, so that you fix the issue over the coming weeks after Drupalcon.

It's never too late

Even if you've been in the Drupal community for over a decade, just come along. Jump in. You'll enjoy it.

A very welcoming place to start contributing is to work on Drupal documentation. This is how I made my first contribution, at Drupalcon London in 2011. In Vienna, this table was mentored by Amber Matz from Drupalize.Me.

This is one of the most experienced mentors, Valery Lourie (valthebald). We'll meet him again in part 3, when we come to the Drupalcon Vienna live commit.

Here's Dries. He comes along and walks around, no one takes any notice because they are too engaged and too busy. And so he gets to talk to people without being interrupted.

This is what Drupal is about. It's not about the code. It's about the people.

Next time. Just come. As a sprinter or a mentor. EVERYONE is welcome, we mean that.

This is a three-part blog post series:Part one is here
You've just finished reading part two
Part three is coming soon

As you’ve probably read in one of our previous blogposts, industry verticals will be a new concept at Drupal Europe. Verticals replace the summits, which typically took place on Monday, before the conference. Sometimes these were in separate a location from the main conference venue, and often the conference ticket did not cover access to the summits. At Drupal Europe summits have become industry verticals and are integrated with the rest of the conference — same location, same ticket. Following is a summary of what to expect in the new verticals at Drupal Europe.

Verticals bring together people from an industry to:

about outstanding projects being developed in their field

share their interests and ideas

listen and learn together in sessions

discuss challenges and develop solutions for their market

With all the topics under one roof, every session you are interested in is within easy reach. There will be a guide to specific sessions and people that are involved in your industry: Media and Publishing.

However, nothing will stop you from getting off the beaten track to mix & match your interests! One Drupal Europe ticket gives you access to everything we have on offer: sessions, workshops, panels, sprints, and BoFs. In this example you might start with a great session about a new top-notch publishing site, get dragged into details of the site’s complex workflow rules and later jump into a technical session, to understand a specific decoupled approach the site was built with.

All attendees will enjoy a amazing program providing insights into industry-specific challenges and solutions. The Media and Publishing industry is a great example of an industry that faced huge challenges. It has had to almost reinvent itself to adapt to the digital age in order to be successful in the 21st century with our society’s media consumption shifting from paper to digital.

We want to provide the best possible lineup of speakers, panels and sessions for the publishing/media vertical. Drupal Europe will be open to allow you to submit your great session idea very soon. As a choice of different verticals will be available on the website, please tag your session as publishing/media to indicate that it is related to this industry. We welcome proposals for all topics related to publishing/media!

If you have something interesting to share (questions, thoughts, advice), that might help us before we officially open our call for papers, please reach out to hello@drupaleurope.org.

Honestly, I don’t read a lot of fiction. I’m much more interested in non-fiction. So the upcoming The Board Game Book looks to be right up my alley. It’s all about last year’s greatest hits in terms of games, including interviews with the designers and insight into what made those games such a hit. Expect […]

DRNK Games has started taking pre-orders for Drinkuisition, their thinking-person’s drinking game. Raise your tankard and challenge yourself through various rounds of questions on all manner of topics while you continually get more and more sloshed. From the announcement: Drinkuisition, the drinking game for the thinking person, is finally available for pre-order through their website, […]

Dark Souls isn’t a very forgiving game. Death awaits you around every corner. The same is true for the card game from Steamforged. But with every monster comes new opportunities. And the Forgotten Path expansion, coming this September, is certainly full of new monsters. It also has two new characters that you can play. Set […]

Modiphius has a new RPG series up and available now in their webshop. City of Mist puts players in a dark and gritty world as detectives in a city where magic and myth invade the real world on a regular basis. These mean streets are stalked by just your average gang members and junkies. Thankfully, […]

(Two gamers are sitting in a horse-drawn carriage as it goes down the road. One is carrying his decks of cards, while another has a tacklebox full of minis. They hit a bump, and the two fumble their belongings onto each other) Gamer 1: Hey! You got your minis game in my CCG! Gamer 2: […]

We are now featured on Clutch.co with an overall 5-star rating from our clients and on Clutch’s sister website, The Manifest, as one of the top web developers in Chicago. We work to build strategic relationships, not just accounts. We listen to what our clients want to achieve and produce websites to meet those goals. A running theme to the client reviews has been our commitment and open communication.

Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews platform that connects small and medium-sized businesses with the developer or software solution that best fits their needs. The Manifest is a research platform meant to aid buyers in the awareness, discovery, and decision-making process of selecting an agency to hire for a project. We are thrilled to be a part of both websites, demonstrating our expertise in web development and design services.

Clutch reviews are unique in that they are verified and independent. Their analysts personally interview our clients to understand what it is truly like to partner with Xeno Media. See what some of them had to say:

“I’ve worked with a variety of outside vendors, and Xeno Media stood out in every aspect of the engagement. I would recommend them to anyone without hesitation.”

“Xeno Media doesn’t just service us—they take care of us. They actually care about and understand us as a client. The level of trust between us is something that is very rare in a client relationship, but they have ours and we have theirs.”

“They're always on top of all aspects of the project. If I ask them to do something, it's done immediately. They're really quick.”

“This was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had working with an outside vendor.”

Special thanks to our clients for taking the time to share their candid comments with the Clutch analysts. It has been our pleasure working with you! We would also like to thank Clutch for including us in their research. We are looking forward to maintaining our rank as a leading web developer and reading more great reviews soon.

Plaid Hat Games is coming out with a new expansion for Specter Ops. It’s called Broken Covenant and it’s adding a lot more possible units for players to use in the game. In this preview, we get a look at 4 new Hunters. Each one is perfectly equipped for their chosen task. From the post: […]

I can’t wait until it’s August. Mostly, because it means that it’s the gateway to Autumn, my favorite time of the year. It’s also Gen Con, because I love that show. But also, it’s because there’s new releases coming from Privateer Press. Ok, so they have new releases every month, but they’re showing of August’s […]

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